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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Embarrassing moments - #13

(En español más abajo)

Embarrassing moments

Following up on this week’s story about ‘Pucho’ and speaking of that choir...

I worked with "Bridas" choir for many years, almost until I left Argentina. Though most of the singers were employees or their relatives, the choir was quite good, and with the support of the company, we got to do really cool stuff, like those two opera live concerts in which we recorded live CDs in front of an audience of many hundreds.

One of the gigs leading to our first concert was at a small library in downtown Buenos Aires. It was a weeknight, and traffic is always really bad, so we weren't too worried when it started to look like Roberto (our conductor) was going to be late. After all, he lives in the North of the Great Buenos Aires, and traffic is always unpredictable.

But the concert time came and he was definitely a no-show. We somehow got a call from him saying that his car was broken. We had a full house and no conductor, what to do?

Me and Gustavo (the other section lead) started to think of how to carry on without Roberto. "You should conduct", he said.

"Are you nuts?", I replied. "You're the musician here!". Gustavo is not only a really good singer but also an excellent -and prestigious- classic guitar player. "But you have all the basses but Jorge (JorMig), and it's just me and Victor in the tenor section", he observed and he was right.

I had no idea of what to offer as a concert program. We discussed it briefly, and then ended doing a programme that had a mix of opera choruses and contemporaneous pieces like tangos, etc. Very eclectic!

We were doing quite well so far, so I actually gained enough confidence to start talking to the public, introducing every piece and even some background or anecdotal info about them. The guys in the choir could not believe it. Me and Gus were smiling: we were going to get away with it!

Until we got to the final number. I had chosen an opera piece that we were quite good at, "Regina Coeli" from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana”. We were doing fantastic until I realized that there was a 1-min instrumental bridge in the middle of the song.

Knowing that I was going to lose all credibility in spite of having explained how precarious our situation was, I did the unthinkable: I broke the four wall right in the middle of the piece and told the crowd:

- And here is where the instrumental part comes; it goes like this...

And then I started to hum it!!! And then the soprano soloist part!!!! I could hear the sound of chorister eyes getting incredibly big right behind me.

How to top that? Easy, after our encore and while thanking the public once again for their patience and understanding, I said:

- I hope you can overlook all the little mistakes we made tonight. I'm clearly not a conductor, but we really wanted to perform for you people tonight, even though we knew that nobody would be able to tell when we were singing the wrong notes better than you...

Why? Oh, yes. It wasn't just a library. It was the Buenos Aires library for the blind...